Sufyan bin Uzayr, Freelance Writer, Graphic Artist and Photographer, www.sufyan.co.nr
Linux
Running processes in background
If you wish to run a process in the background, simply affix '&' at the end of the command. For instance,
#pcq.sh &
Note that the above command will be killed if you close the Terminal. If you want the command to continue running even after you close the Terminal, use the 'nohup' command. For example:
#nohup pcq.sh &
The above command will continue to run in the background even if you close the Terminal session. To end it, simply pass the KILL command.
The 'time' command
The 'time' command can help in timing the execution of a program. To do so, simply enter 'time' at the prompt followed by the command, as shown below:
#time
For example, if you wish to run a stopwatch:
#time cat
In order to stop the watch, hit Ctrl+D. You will then be shown the time elapsed since the command was initially issued.
Mozilla Firefox
Tagging Bookmarks in Firefox
You can organize your Firefox bookmarks by tagging them with keywords. Once you add a keyword as a tag, such as 'political' in the example below, Firefox will automatically offer it as a tag keyword for all your future bookmarks.
You can then use the keywords in the address bar and Firefox will bring up all bookmarked sites associated with that tag.
Setting up default applications
You can specify the default applications for your web browser under the Applications tab in Preferences/Settings. For example, if you click a 'mailto:' link in Firefox under Windows, it will most probably bring up Microsoft Outlook or your operating system's default mail program. If you wish to change this setting, simply specify a new mail program in the email client option. You can even choose to use web based GMail or Yahoo! Mail for this purpose. This option can be set for audio, video, documents such as Word/OpenOffice/PDF, images, ZIP files and many other file types.
Useful Firefox Shortcuts
Mozilla Firefox offers numerous shortcuts; some of the most commonly used ones are as follows:
Ctrl+Enter: Appends .com to the end of the URL in Address Bar
Shift+Enter: Appends .net to the end of the URL
Ctrl+Shift+Enter: Appends .org to the end of the URL
Ctrl+Shift+T: Re-opens the last closed tab (current session only)
Alt+D: Highlights the URL of the website in the Location Bar
Ctrl+Page Up/Down: Moves to previous/next tab/ : Quick find
Ctrl+
Shift+
Ctrl+Shift+Del: Brings up the Erase History/Cache, etc. dialog
Hitting Ctrl Twice: It will launch the Google search page, if you have Google Desktop installed.
Ctrl+L: Go to Address Bar
Ctrl+K: Go to Search Bar
Ctrl+Tab: Cycle between tabs
Microsoft Windows Command Line/Cross-Platform
Using UNIX commands in Windows
More often than not, we end up switching between operating systems —-a user may be employing Linux at his workplace but working on Windows at home, or vice-versa. If this is the case with you too, chances are that you have often ended up issuing Linux commands in Windows command line, and have been greeted by the 'Command Not Found' or 'Bad Command or File Name' error messages.
In such a case, you can use 'UnxUtils', a Windows compatible library of commonly used UNIX commands. You can download the binary file from http://unxutils.sourceforge.net
The binary file contains UNIX utilities for Win32 platform and it makes use of the 'msvcrt.dll' file in the Windows system folder. In order to use the commands, extract the contents of the downloaded file to a folder (say, C:\pcq\unxutils\ ). Now, add the folder C:\pcq\unxutils\usr\local\wbin to the 'PATH' variable of your environment. Following that, you can now use the common UNIX commands in the Windows command prompt as well.
Bear in mind, however, that UnxUtils contains only the commonly used commands, and not ALL the UNIX
commands. If you wish to check for the inclusion of a
specific command before downloading, you can do so at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnxUtils